Hello Joe,
>> Nikkud. I know all about them and they are rarely used in adult Hebrew.
>> Your proposal to force authors everywhere to use kiddie Hebrew
>> ain't gonna
>> cut it, Reuven.
I opened randomly Tom Clancy "Debt of Honor", do you know this book? It's
from 1995 and certainly not for children.
I opened it randomly at page 209 and found:
3 Russian words written with Hebrew letters with partial Nikud for better
reading.
1 word with partial Nikud so people will not read it wrong.
I opened another book and on the title the name of the author is written
with partial Nikud. Again for people to read it correctly.
I opened three other pages in the two books and could not find any Nikud.
What I am saying is that Nikud is not childish. You are right, people will
not read a book with all Nikud, but they will accept a book with small
amount of Nikud which will help them read the word correctly especially with
strange names.
>> Fix your adaptive technology. Don't try to tell people how to write.
The reason that you people have so good text to speech synthesizer in
English is because there is a large market for it in telephony, games and so
on. Text to phonetic in English is quite simple, but nobody thought about
blind people when created very good voices for English phonetic to speech.
Money makes the world go round.
Israel is small, Hebrew language has a limitation both in text to phonetic
and the regular money solving problems with the phonetic to speech. So,
nobody invests in text to speech in Hebrew. This is the best or almost the
best that can be done with the current efforts. We will be able to work much
harder and get a percent more and so on but we will never reach the 100%.
To the best of my knowledge, the problems in Arabic are the same. Maybe
someone here on the list which worked with Arabic text to speech can speak
about his experience.
Thank you,
Reuven Nisser
Ofek Liyladenu
http://www.ofek-liyladenu.org.il